Letters to the editor: Dysfunctional politics mars city

I drove through downtown Detroit the other day. It was familiar to me. I lived in the city during my middle school years and moved away to return to the city when I attended Wayne State University. So, as a boy and a young man, I had been through Detroit often before. But somehow, I had never quite sensed Detroit’s appalling desolation. Here was the very heart of the state, the largest city of Michigan. It was once the center of its most lucrative and characteristic activity, but now there was a scene so dreadfully hideous and so intolerably bleak and forlorn. There was once wealth almost beyond imagination, but now there it was full of abominable human habitations.

What I allude to is the unbroken and agonizing ugliness of nearly every house in sight. Seeing many of the homes surrounding the downtown Detroit area was downright startling. Despite all the investment and good intentions of all the entrepreneurs and despite the new stadiums, new business enterprises and restaurants, there is hideousness and despair in residential neighborhoods

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Detroit looks and feels uncomfortable and unmanageable. Like its politics, it seems empty, uncaring and dysfunctional. There is still plenty of room for building today. The empty houses in Detroit exist by the hundreds and thousands like gravestones in some gigantic and decaying cemetery. The physical ugliness of the city matches its financial problems that includes absence of services and true leadership. It seems as if nowhere on earth is there anything compared to suffering and plight of this city. One cannot imagine a political decision making process so devoted to self-destruction.

I am sure that all of the people who live in Detroit want something better, but the city has sadly become a national joke due to its shocking political behavior and absence of the most basic life-saving services that include police, firefighting and EMS services.

Anger is the only thing that keeps Detroit alive today. It is the only thing that is abundance in Detroit.